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How I Finally Started Using a Calendar
For years, I wanted to become the kind of person who plans their life. I would try using a calendar or keeping notes, hoping that this time I would get used to it. Somehow, I always ended up living without either.
I still needed to understand dates. How many weeks were left before something happened? How far apart were two plans? Where did the next few months fit into the rest of the year? Those questions mattered to me even when I had no calendar habit at all.
Eventually, one small Mac app became part of my everyday life. I kept using it for years, including long after its developer had stopped working on it. That seemed perfectly fine until keeping it became a problem I could no longer ignore.
Originally published at https://reverseeverything.com on October 20, 2026.
One click to see the year
Coming from Windows, I was used to clicking the clock in the system tray to see a calendar. On the Mac, clicking the date and time in the menu bar opens Notification Center.
Notification Center can hold calendar widgets, but Apple’s built-in options show the current month or upcoming events, without a full-year view. That ruled them out for me. I wanted all twelve months visible at once, large enough to read comfortably and reachable with a…
